What's Up Magazines

Short of The Big Lebowski, stoner flicks have proven a redundant lot, each with their share of short-term memory-loss jokes, a few references to the munchies, a soundtrack filled with classic reggae favorites, and at least one montage of your title characters getting really, really, really high.  Then there’s the comparatively new class of I-don’t-wanna-grow-up buddy comedies—Superbad, Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin— produced by Judd Apatow and his band of lost boys. They’re each dialogue-heavy...

Early Saturday morning, standing a few feet from a ping-pong table covered in red Solo cups filled with cheap beer, I found myself in an unexpected conversation. A friend of a friend came by for the night, mingling with the post-college crowd and blending in seamlessly. Turned out, in addition to having good taste in music and a more than a few clever one-liners, he was a Reconnaissance Marine, such as those depicted in Generation Kill, and had some interesting things to say about the HBO mini-series...

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS), in their infinite wisdom, has released the 2008 nominees for the Emmy Awards, a supposedly meaningful distinction that continues its embarrassing crawl to complete irrelevance.For the fifth year, the ATAS has decided that The Wire, the greatest show in the history of television, is not one of the five best shows of the year. Rather than honoring the one program that had the vision to contextualize plagues of urban America such as de-industrialization,...

Prior to the weekend of June 28-30 2008, “The Battle of the Beltway” was nothing but a marketing slogan attached to a lifeless interleague match-up between two hapless ball clubs.Now? Well, it’s a reference to a potential rivalry between the Orioles and the Nationals, two teams that remain, admittedly, quite hapless. I know, this doesn’t sound like the enthusiastic review that normally precedes a “this is when it all started” declaration, but in sports, nothing is more transparent than melodrama....

Check out sights and sounds from the finish line.Race Across America (RAAM) may be the coolest sporting event that no one knows about.I'm not lecturing, here, either. I just learned about it at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, when cyclists began staggering across the finish line at City Dock, 8 days after setting out across the country from Oceanside, CA.Consider this: Jure Robic, for his 4th consecutive RAAM victory, traveled 3,000 miles in 8 days, 23 hours, and 33 minutes. That's an average of 400 miles per...

How has every person older than 20 not yet stood up in protest of Disney Pixar's newest offering?Wall-E, apparently the story of two robots whose conflicting personalities bring out the best in one another, features a main character who looks shockingly familiar to anyone with even a vague memory of the '80s. Ally Sheedy, it's time for you to protest in the name of your defunct robot fling. Johnny Five, of Short Circuit fame, can't speak for himself. It's time for you to speak for him.This really...

Just finished watching an old episode of Homicide: Life on the Street from 1993. I was ten when Homicide aired, so I can't offer much in terms of how the show has aged. In general, it feels more vintage than dated. Homicide did at least one thing better than any other police procedural. Law and Order and CSI completely throw away the pieces of dialogue that aren't part of the "investigation" scenes. Homicide fills those exchanges with quips that are in no way connected to the episode's arc. In an...

A friend of mine wrote this article for Sports Illustrated a few days ago: Philly Goes 100 Seasons Without a Championship Once again, I'll summarize the story for those too lazy to follow the link (even though we're talking about a friend of mine writing a story for the preeminent sports publication in the world, but I digress).The Philadelphia Flyers were eliminated from the NFL playoffs this weekend, making it exactly 100 professional sports seasons since a team from Philadelphia won a Championship....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/sports/football/24league.html?_r=1&oref=slogin For those too lazy to read the link, here’s the gist of it: A Connecticut based entrepreneur has conceived of a spring football league that will augment, rather than compete with, the NFL. Playing in college stadiums in reasonably populated areas, the teams will be composed of accomplished college players who were on the fringe of making the NFL. Unlike past start-ups, this league will encourage the NFL to scout...

I tried to go to Washington D.C.’s Earth Day Celebration this weekend. The Green Apple Music Festival, a free event in eight cities,featured an impressive lineup of music including The Roots, Government Mule, Umphrey’s McGee, and Toots and the Maytals. The festival also included a slate of activists, comedians, and elected officials who I’m sure had a great deal of eye-opening remarks planned (since when do prosperous persons standing behind pedestals say anything else?)As it...