I'm a guy and a I can admit that. I wouldn't quite go so far as "confirmed bachelor", but pretty darn close.

Anyway, I just went to put some ravioli in the microwave, but it wouldn't sit flat on the turntable. It turns out that there was a bag of sweet peas in one of those steamer microwavable bags…that I had forgotten to consume at least two nights ago.

Good thing I was watching Rizoli and Isles and got a craving for ravioli. This story could have ended much worse than it did.

Atlas Shrugged, Part II was supposed to be better than Part I because they had a bigger budget and a better cast if not crew. I wasn't convinced by their advertisement because I frankly liked the earlier cast and thought that it was a directing/editing problem. True to form, Atlas Shrugged, Part II was worse than part 1.

The money speech was cut to three sentences and the lesson that d'Anconia gives to Rearden was missing in its entirety. Likewise, Rearden's trial was watered down and cut short and the time that Rearden had with the wet nurse was nonexistent. There was no Ragnar, no d'Anconia working covertly in the mills for months and the big fight at Rearden's didn't happen either. Over all, a lackluster piece of cinema with way to much removal of source material.

Cloud Atlas was supposed to be this magnificent, intelligent film that went throughout various time periods and taught us something deep about humanity. Well, there were several poignant moments, and for the $100+ million that was spent on it did produce a stunning image and precisely-engineered sound. But at the end of the day, it was a $100 million re-make of The Fountain with 1/100th of the depth of story or meaning.

Per the trailer, Skyfall is a James Bond film. The trailer makes it look like there's some kind of mission that Bond was part of but went rogue/disappeared/presumed dead and somehow completed the mission. Meanwhile, there are a lot of dead bodies that M is left to account for because of the failed mission. According to the trailer, Bond should have come back, got himself together, took names and kicked ass. Instead, there more more drama-less, action-less moments in this film than in the previous failure Quantum of Solace a film which James Bond himself issued an apology.

Skyfall does have redeeming moments–perhaps enough to merit a second look. Perhaps I'm just jaded by Casino Royale–a film that starts with action, is full of action and ends with action. But this is about trailers and films not matching up.

Which brings me to Flight with Denzel Washington. From the trailer, I expected this to be a film about a pilot that pulls a plane out of an impossible situation and lands it as safely and gently as possible despite the fact that he has a drinking problem that isn't fully explained by the trailer. I assumed that the film would be about the cause of his drinking problem and the bulk of the film would be about how he rises to overcome any kind of negligence charges. Instead, this film was 30 minutes of plane crash, 1hr 30 watching a drunk be a drunk and 10 minutes of personal responsibility. No drama whatsoever.

I don't know if I've become an old curmudgeon or if the state of filmmaking/advertising has gotten so bad that the only option open to producers is to lie in their advertisements.

What I do know is that I have been able to redeem these atrocities via TV of all things. Since we last met, I completed Season 1 of Once Upon a Time, a fantastic piece of cinema and entertainment. I like the cinematography, I like the acting, especially Robert Carlyle's. The dialog is tidy, the characters believable and the season feels like the never-ending story you get wrapped up in and hate to leave when your eyes scan the words, "The End".

I'm looking forward to Season 2 and will likely add both to my collection along with Downton Abbey.

For me, the jury is still out on Mad Men after having finished a season. It's slow and I'm not sure how much more of the over-the-top sex in the city, sex in the suburbs, sex in the bedroom I can put up with.

Up next is Castle Season 4 followed by Rizzol & Isles, Hell on Wheels and Homeland. I'm not a huge fan of Castle, though it has its moments. I wished it was a darker show along the lines of Dexter. To me, the best metaphor to describe Castle is chewing bubble gum.

Via The Washington Post:

A mother and son stole more than $2 million in expensive toys by stashing them inside the boxes of cheaper products that they bought at Toys R Us stores across the U.S.

[…]

Michael and Margaret Pollara visited 139 Toys R Us in 27 states, including California, Hawaii and New York, buying nearly $7,000 worth of small-ticket items to fuel their scam, according to the affidavit. Authorities were able to track Michael Pollara’s purchases across the country because he used a Toys R Us rewards card for all of his purchases.

This was too juicy not to pass up. To me, there are several of things wrong with this story.

• How is it that Toys R Us didn't notice that they had lost $2 million in inventory? Are they really do that well these days? I just don't think of Toys R Us being that profitable these days.



• Why didn't any of the hiding of the more expensive items in the inexpensive item's boxes not set off any alarms? What kind of security is Toys R Us running?



• For that matter, why didn't anyone notice the small, unboxed items hiding around the stores?

I mean, really. I'm having a hard time deciding which way I want to lean on this story. Do I give this team a thumbs up because they actually pulled the caper off? Do I instead wish to see them punished for stealing from Toys R Us which in turn had an impact on the flailing economy? Or, do I instead blame Toys R Us for not running a tighter ship?

The mind boggles.

Godfrey Bloom explains why countries go into debt so that even politicians can understand!

The trailers didn't excite me.

"No glasses!"

Horace Dediu of asymo.com fame released numbers a while back analyzing Apple's monumental 2011 holiday quarter. To whit:

• The iPhone has grown at an average rate of 100% year on year.


• The iPad has grown at an average rate of 150% year on year.

It recently occurred to me what this means should the numbers hold true this holiday quarter: Apple can easily have a quarter with over $50 billion dollars in revenue.

Let's do some back of the envelope math.

37 million iPhones¹ x 2 = 74 million iPhones to be sold in calendar Q4 2012.
15.5 million iPads¹ x 2.5 = 31 million iPads to be sold in calendar Q4 2012.
------
105 million iPhones + iPads to be sold in Calendar Q4 2012.
x $500 Average Selling Price
-------
$52.5 billion for just iPhones and iPads

But $500 ASP is far below what was calculated here: $630/phone.
It is safe to say that the iPad has enjoyed an ASP of no less than $600²

And we haven't started counting Macs, iTunes, iPods, etc.

While I'm not a financial adviser and anything published here on this blog should not be considered professional financial advice, I believe it is safe to say that if Apple continues its upward trajectory, we will see a very impressive holiday quarter this year and therefore "You should bet on the Bitten Fruit"™.

Recently on The Critical Path, Horace Dediu made the point that if you have a product that depends on a network, the way to disrupt the product is not to attack the product but instead to attack the network, with the idea being that the network is what makes the product impervious to disruption. As an example, Dediu pointed to the use of bicycles in Holland. Curiously, bicycles sell for cheap ($10 was the number thrown out) and one person that he interviewed stated that she owned several bicycles and left them strewn around town.

But the curiosity doesn't stop there. It turns out that bicycles in Holland are old and rusty. Why? Because they are frequently stolen and then resold on the street. Since everyone has a bicycle, there is little law enforcement can do, so bicycles are "cheap utilitarian transport" to borrow a phrase from James May.

After explaining this phenomenon, Dediu went on to say that his hypothesis had been that bicycle travel in Holland was ubiquitous because the terrain is relatively flat and the climate mild year-round. But it turns out this was not the causality. The causality, as you might have guessed, was the network for bicycles; in this case, the roads.

The roads were built with bicycle lanes and pedestrian lanes. Because the infrastructure was in place and good condition, the populace utilized it.

In a later episode, Dediu said, "The way to disrupt the car isn't to make a better car, but to not have the car at all." The idea here was that yes, the (road) network is the way to disrupt the automobile but really, the automobile is the thing that isn't good enough and as such, there needs to be an integrated solution in place that disrupts the entire value chain. If there was a method of transport devised that didn't require a network of roads (i.e. flight) then the car AND its value chain could be obliterated altogether.

Ok, so what does this have to do with Apple releasing a product like iTV? The problem, simply put, is the network.

Which network? NBC? ABC? CNN?

In a word: no.

The network that needs to be disrupted is the internet.

I know, I know. The internet is "The Great Democratizer" and has turned us all into "Push-button publishers". And that's all great. It's progressive. And it's in danger.

Think about it like this: how do you connect to the Internet? I'm not asking if you use an iPhone or an iMac. I'm asking how do the bits come into your house? Bonus question: how do the bits get into your workplace?

"What is an ISP?"

Indeed. An even better question: "Who are the ISPs?" Put another way, name for me an ISP that is neither an telephone company (cellular or otherwise) or a provider of televised content. This rules out AT&T, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Knology, Charter and Dish Network to name a few.

Many times Dediu has discussed the value chain (network) that makes television impervious to disruption. But I think there is a more insidious part of the value chain that is overlooked entirely: the wires that the bits and signals flow over to bring that content into your office and into your home.

While it is true that cable television has a limited life span as does the automobile, both are entrenched and aren't likely to be disrupted any time soon. There is too much value in both the value chains and the network for incumbents to allow themselves to be disrupted.

Case in point: Hollywood has been able to stay in business as long as it has because being a fully integrated product, it is adaptable and therefore resistant to disruption, thus LA has been able to keep a chokehold on the market. If a studio makes a movie and distributes it to theaters, big box retailers (i.e. optical media) and online digitally, the studio itself is a large portion of the value chain. So the consumer continues to pay the price for motion picture that Tinseltown demands.

How could Apple disrupt the network effect of ISPs? I don't really see a way currently. Sure, Apple has a lot of wireless capable devices out in the wild, so in theory Apple has enough end points to build a mesh network, but what good does that do? The content that you want to consume is on the other end of an ISP's connection, so how could you route data without crossing over the backbone? And even if you could solve the routing problem, the radios in Apple's phones, tablets, laptops and desktops wouldn't be strong enough to carry a reliable, persistent connection to the mesh.

I think that Apple can make inroads to disrupting parts of the value chain involved with television or, alternatively, change how we think about or experience TV. But until there is a content delivery mechanism in place that doesn't require traditional ISPs–ISPs that have a duplicit interest in content delivery–I don't think that television can be disrupted by Apple or otherwise.